How MAGA is turning on itself

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Episode: How MAGA is Turning on Itself
Date: July 24, 2026
Host: Brian Walsh (filling in for Sean Illing)
Guest: Zach Beauchamp, Vox Senior Correspondent

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Overview

This episode dives into the turmoil and internal contradictions within the American right, particularly among leading MAGA figures caught in self-created ideological traps. The discussion, drawing from Beauchamp's recent piece, explores the "hot dog man" metaphor: key conservative personalities now panicking over the consequences of a movement they helped build, but refusing to reckon with their own roles. The episode unpacks how the right continues to radicalize, splinters between factions, and elevates ever more extreme figures, all while major power players mostly evade self-reflection.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Hot Dog Man" Metaphor: Origins and Implications

• Definition: Coined by Beauchamp, "hot dog men" refers to prominent conservatives who decry the current state of the right while ignoring or denying their own complicity in its direction (02:20).
• Source: The term comes from a Tim Robinson sketch where a guy in a hot dog costume denies responsibility after crashing a hot dog-shaped car into a store — a meme for obvious guilty parties pretending to look for the culprit.
• Significance: This lack of self-criticism reveals how many right-wing leaders are unwilling or unable to confront their direct hand in the movement's evolution.

  "It's a lack of self reflection, a conspicuous inability to follow through on the logical implications of the criticisms here that slot one into hot dog category." – Zach Beauchamp (06:15)

2. Case Studies in MAGA Self-Destruction

Thomas Massie: The Libertarian’s Downfall

• Background: Massie, a Tea Party libertarian, perfectly diagnosed Trump's appeal in 2017 ("the craziest son of a bitch in the race") yet campaigned as a Trump loyalist, voting with him 91% of the time (04:31).
• Outcome: Despite loyalty, minor "heresies" (like opposition to Iran war policies) got him primaried and ousted by the very base he thought he understood.
• Key Dynamic: Even as casualties of MAGA extremism, figures like Massie won't publicly reckon with their role, instead staying loyal to the "cause." (06:27)

  "To call into question any fundamental elements ... would be, in a way, being like a traitor—not just publicly, but to oneself." – Zach Beauchamp (06:38)

Ben Shapiro & Candace Owens: Frankenstein’s Monster

• Backstory: Shapiro's Daily Wire made Owens a star despite her deep conspiratorial and extremist record. Fired her only after her anti-Semitic radicalism became too overt (08:19).
• Fallout: Owens, now independent, thrives with a massive online following, while the Daily Wire's fortunes decline.
• Reflection: Shapiro denounces her actions but never acknowledges his responsibility for elevating her in the first place.

  "He created the monster that he is now decrying. And in very Frankensteinian fashion, he's sort of looking to try to slay the monster without seriously questioning the hubris that created it." – Zach Beauchamp (10:55)

• Failed Gatekeeping: Even Trump’s distancing from Owens hasn’t diminished her popularity, illustrating that audience loyalty now outweighs leadership authority (13:04).

  "What we're seeing from this hot dog phenomenon is that ... the right's gatekeepers of order and good taste ... can't control it. None of them can. They're just failing." (14:54)

Trump and the Epstein Conspiracy

• Dynamic: Trump enabled conspiratorial thinking (e.g., Epstein) for years, but when the conspiracy spotlight turns on him, his loyal base stays unfazed (18:58).
• Analysis: Trump's personal charisma allows him to override not just party norms, but also the very grievances he promoted.

  "He has a unique ability to not suffer the consequences of his actions because he can control so many people, or at least has the loyalty of so many people." (19:43)

3. The Engine of MAGA: Resentment & Transgression

• Resentment after the Civil Rights Revolution: Conservative grievance politics often aims at dismantling post-1960s liberal norms and hierarchies (22:43).
• Transgression as Currency: The audience rewards those who break new taboos—the "ladder" analogy: each new figure pushes further than the last (25:39).

  "The Republican base wants to see elements of that order smashed ... They hate the way in which liberal cultural concepts really shape public life." (24:18)

Escalation & Boundary-Breaking:

• Example: Chris Rufo, a key activist, once backed even more extreme candidates (Joe Kent) but now tries to halt further radicalization. Yet, there's still no reckoning with having helped escalate extremism in the first place (26:01–29:18).
• Institutions Powerless: Right-wing institutions (e.g., Heritage Foundation) can't or won't rein in extremists; instead, leaders who move toward the fringe often outlast any institutional pushback (29:33–32:52).

  "Every right wing institution is, to a degree, made itself over into being ... Trump friendly ... There was no antibodies there." (31:00)

4. Anti-Semitism: The Last Transgression?

• Observation: Young conservatives are now the most anti-Semitic demographic; anti-Semitism became the foremost new taboo for attention and audience growth (32:52).
• Mechanism: As allegations of bigotry lost stigma on the right (seen as 'leftist thought policing'), anti-Semitic content found a lucrative, receptive online audience.

  "The end result was to create a world in which those allegations [of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.] have no force at all, even when it's obvious that somebody is running afoul." (34:03)

• Key Example: Explicit figures like Nick Fuentes build significant followings by embracing anti-Semitism, showing the renewable appeal of ever-bolder violation of mainstream norms (36:09).

5. Where Does This End? GOP Futures

• Three Paths after Trump:
  1. Establishment Restoration: Unlikely, but possible via infighting among MAGA factions creating space for "old guard" candidates (40:06).
  2. Continued Radicalization: More likely—a figure like J.D. Vance becomes the MAGA standard-bearer, emboldening the more radical "blood and soil" wing (43:25).
  3. Factional Chaos: Most likely—no singular leader, just perpetual fractious battles among increasingly extreme sub-factions.

  "Without [Trump], I don't see how the Republican Party can tame the competing factions inside of it." (44:12)

6. The Future of Right-Wing Extremism—With & Without Power

• Pattern: Out of power, the American right reliably turns to maximalist, existential rhetoric, feeling society is being destroyed by liberal governance (45:35).
• Prediction: If/when they lose power, the right's zero-sum framing will only intensify, likely fueling even more radical extremism.

  "Politics will be perceived as a zero sum game of dominance, where if we lose, we’re dead, the country is dead, the America that you love is dead, your children’s future is dead. ... That will be a major register of right wing discourse." (47:28)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On self-reflection:
  "Breaking out of that ... intellectual shackle is difficult for anybody. It’s especially difficult when it involves saying, I made certain choices that were mistakes and that contributed to the problem." — Zach Beauchamp (06:38)
• On the failure of conservative gatekeepers:
  "They want to try to gatekeep that stuff, and they can’t. None of them can. They’re just failing." — Zach Beauchamp (14:54)
• On the direction of the movement:
  "So much of conservative politics is a resentment at that order ... The base wants to see elements of that order smashed, elements of those norms destroyed." — Zach Beauchamp (24:18)
• On the power vacuum post-Trump:
  "After Trump, you don’t have a kingmaker in the Republican Party. ... So what you get is going to be a bare knuckles brawl." — Zach Beauchamp (40:06)
• On politics as existential conflict:
  "Politics will be perceived as a zero sum game of dominance, where if we lose, we’re dead, the country is dead ... That will be a major register of right wing discourse." — Zach Beauchamp (47:28)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening & Concept of "Hot Dog Man" – 01:16 to 03:59
• Thomas Massie Case Study – 03:59 to 07:44
• Ben Shapiro / Candace Owens Case Study – 07:44 to 15:14
• Trump & Conspiracy Culture – 18:58 to 22:10
• Ideological Drivers and Escalations – 22:10 to 29:18
• Institutional Failure to Gatekeep – 29:18 to 32:52
• The Anti-Semitism Escalation – 32:52 to 37:54
• Three Futures for the Right – 39:49 to 45:13
• Right-Wing Extremism Out of Power – 45:13 to 48:13

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Conclusion & Takeaways

The right’s current turmoil is rooted in a cycle where leaders manufacture outrage, unleash unpredictable radical impulses, and then express horror at the fruits of their own strategy—all without grappling with their own accountability. As MAGA cannibalizes itself and inching ever further right, true gatekeeping proves impossible, and the breakdown of old norms continues apace. Post-Trump, the future likely holds chaotic infighting among factions, further boundary-breaking, and little hope for meaningful self-correction—no matter who wields institutional power.

Transcript

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[Brian Walsh]

Welcome to the Gray Area. I'm Brian Walsh, filling in for Sean Illing. There's a sketch in the Tim Robinson comedy show I Think youk Should Leave, where a hot dog shaped car plows into a storefront and a guy in a hot dog costume turns to the crowd and says, we're all trying to find the guy who did this. It's a meme you'll see about once a day on the Internet. And according to my guest, it's also a pretty good picture of the American right in 2026. My guest is Vox senior correspondent Zach Beecham, who wrote a piece about what he calls the hot dog nap, the MAGA stars who are suddenly, loudly panicked about what's happening within the movement they spent a decade building today. Who they are, what actually powers all this, and whether outlasts the man at the center of it. Zach Beacham, welcome back to the Gray area.

[Zach Beecham]

Hey, thanks Brian. I'm used to saying Sean here, but it's nice to see you here too.

[Brian Walsh]

I'll do my best to fill in for him. So Zach, let's start with your your piece who are the hot dog men of the American Right that you refer to and what actually makes someone one?

[Zach Beecham]

This group is what I found to be in sort of daily enterprise of following what's going on at the American Right, checking in, reading articles, following their Twitter feeds, et cetera. A group of people who are are very upset with certain elements of where the political right is going. But at the same time, they had a role in this particular evolution of the right. And sometimes a very direct one, I think, don't really want to talk about it and in fact show few signs of self reflection or self criticism about the choices that they've made in this regard. And so the name the Hot Dog Men comes from a sketch, a TV show from Tim Robbins, I think you should leave where a guy is in a hot dog suit and he's wandering around a clothing store where there's been a car that crashed into it. And he's saying, we're all trying to find the guy who did this. And the catch is the car is hot dog shaped. So he very obviously crashed the car. Right. And you know, he just continues across through the sketch, denies that any responsibility becomes increasingly ridiculous. And that's what's going on with these figures. And, you know, when I first came up with the piece and the label, I really didn't want it to be just like a term of derision. The point is that people who are really bought and paid in on the American rights and leading figures who don't want to leave it are in a kind of self criticism mode. And that is telling about where the right is at right now.

[Brian Walsh]

So let's start with one of those hot dog men, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie. You opened the piece with him. So in 2017, he gave maybe the most honest explanation I've ever heard for any elected official on Trump's rise. Trump's voters, according to Massie, weren't voting for libertarian ideas. They were voting for, quote, the craziest son of a bitch in the race, end quote. And in May this year, that craziest son of a bitch Trump basically ended Massey's career when he lost in the primary. Tell that story and how that relates to the whole concept of hot dog man.

[Zach Beecham]

Yeah. The critical thing about Massie is, though, he had this like really profound moment of self reflection in 2017 where he knew, I mean, he was a Tea Party Republican, right. He's a libertarian, came up with that wave of anti government activism that was sort of kicked off during the Obama administration. But Massie then goes on to really sort of embrace being a part of the Trump Republican right. He didn't campaign against Trump, he endorsed him. And even when Trump was campaigning against him, Massie's argument wasn't, you know, I'm showing independence, you should support me because I'm not part of the president. His pitch to Republican primary voters was, I vote with the President 91% of the time. And those few breaks are justified. Right. He's somebody who had spent quite a bit of time not trying to change the Republican Party, not at least overtly, but going along with the direction that it was going in and in fact, working with it.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

Encouraging it, backing its agenda. And now he's left and he's been destroyed by it. Right. He's been pushed out of public life as despite, you know, sort of small, as he says, 91% of the time, he votes for the Republican Party. Heresies. I mean, there are heresies on issues that matter to Trump personally, the Iran war and the Epstein files, but heresies nonetheless. And that got him kicked out, that got him defeated, and yet he's not out here right now talking about him making a mistake or his own role in supporting Trump or thinking maybe he should have done something very differently over the course of that time or trying to build some kind of alternative or sort of even go back to what he was saying in 2017.

[Podcast Advertiser 3]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

It's a lack of self reflection, a conspicuous inability to follow through on the logical implications of the criticisms here that slot one into hot dog category.

[Brian Walsh]

Why don't you think you ever get that reflection? I mean, what do you think he might know in his heart, without asking you to try to read his mind, that he just can't say or feels he can't say, which itself, I think, is really telling?

[Zach Beecham]

I mean, again, it's hard to say. Right. But what's interesting to me, I think, is that Massey is somebody who has been on occasion, willing to criticize the right, as all of these hot dog men are, but never in totality. That's, I think, the important thing. I think that he sees himself as being part of a broader political cause or a movement that is righteous, and so righteous that calling into question any fundamental elements of what drives it would be, in a way, being like a traitor. And not just a traitor to one's party publicly, but a traitor to oneself, to who he believes himself to be and what he believes to stand for. And so that sense of loyalty, of fidelity to one's own beliefs, to commitments to party, it locks you into a particular worldview. And breaking out of that thing is that sort of intellectual shackle is difficult for anybody. It's especially difficult when it involves saying, I made certain choices that were mistakes and that contributed to the problem.

[Brian Walsh]

So let's move on to maybe the sharpest case you have, I think, which is Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro and the case of Candace Owens. So Shapiro hired her Owens when she was out there with a record that was already highly questionable, let's put it that way. Bill Gates conspiracies, really questionable, really awful comments about Hitler. He made her a star and then he fired her when she got too anti Semitic even for the Daily Wire. And now he runs episodes titled things like Candace Owens is evil. So walk us through what happened here, because I do feel like this is maybe the crux of where you can see this phenomenon happening.

[Zach Beecham]

Yeah, I mean, I think this is the most obvious case and in many ways the most interesting one, right? Because it shows the sort of phenomenon in its totality. Ben Shapiro, as listeners probably know, is one of the leading lights of the conservative Internet and commentariat, Right? He's really, really very prominent in that world. His company, the Daily Wire, began as pretty much a runaway success in terms of online publication on the right, like truly stratospheric. They raised enough money to start doing like Hollywood style films. And so in, in the late 2010s, Candace Owens is doing all the stuff that you're talking about, the sort of being becoming prominent for being a provocateur and not just a right wing voice, but one willing to really push the boundaries of what's acceptable. And Shapiro gives her a talk show called Cand this. And then, you know, she starts, while she's at the Daily Wire, pushing, especially when it comes to issues related to Jews and anti Semitism sort of later in her tenure. And this is a big problem because Ben Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew. It's a really important part not only of his belief structure, but his political identity. He's sort of famously pro Israel as part of that worldview. And he is not happy with her behavior, to put it mildly. And it starts divergent to outright anti Semitic territory, you know, like liking an anti Semitic tweet about a rabbi. And this all sort of comes to a crescendo around October 7, as so many things did. And the Gaza war pushes it to its breaking point. Owens is out at the Daily Wire after that, and Shapiro is breaking with her and saying all the things that you say. But then a funny thing happens, right? It's their fortunes diverge, and not in a way that's favorable to Shapiro. Right. You'd think the guy who fired the other person would be the one who comes out on top. But in actuality, Owens as an independent has amassed a huge audience. And in the past two years, the Daily Wire, I mean, it's longer than that. But especially in the past few years, the Daily Wire has Been in free fall. Shapiro shows are not doing as well as they used to. It seems like revenues are going down. And the reason I say that is they had to conduct pretty significant layoffs earlier this year. I don't know exactly how large they are, but they're significant. But the fact that they were succeeding relatively recently and there was a change, it appears, in their trajectory suggests that it has to do, to a degree, with their ideological positioning and with Shapiro taking this stance very much in confrontation to Owens, who has really gone off the deep end. You know, saying things like, brigitte Macron is secretly transgender and abused the French president, her husband when he was a child. Wild stuff and also anti Semitic content. And Shapiro's right to push back on it. And yet. And yet, when you listen to him talk about it, it is always very angry at Owens, very angry at anyone in the mainstream media who will talk about Owens or cover her. And yet the blame never goes to him. He created the monster that he is now decrying. And in very Frankensteinian fashion, he's sort of looking to try to slay the monster without, like, you know, seriously questioning the hubris that created it. At this point, there's this really telling interview he does with the New Yorker's David Remnick where Remnick is asking him about the specific point. It's one of the only times I've ever seen Shapiro engage on this question when he was forced by an interviewer and he asked him about. He mentions that Owen said some provocative things. And Remnick pauses and says, provocative things that you liked. And Shapiro said when talking about first hiring her, some things that I like, most, things that I liked, and some things that I didn't. And what you see right there is that he knew that she was an extremist. He knew that she existed to provoke and deliver shock value. And he hired her because. Or at least in full knowledge of that. I think probably because of it, in part because that's how she got attention. And yet when this. This desire, this ability to push buttons, the thing that he saw in her early on turns against him and a group that he's a part of, he's all outraged. And how could you ever do that?

[Brian Walsh]

Do you think that Shapiro was trying to expel Owens from the broader conservative movement?

[Zach Beecham]

Yes, he's very explicit about that.

[Brian Walsh]

Right. So he clearly failed. What does that tell us? I mean, if he doesn't have the power to do that, does someone else? Does the audience decide?

[Podcast Advertiser 2]

Nope.

[Zach Beecham]

And the crazy thing is, even Trump has tried to not. Not really very hard. But he's tried to go after Candace Owens. Right. You know, Owens famously broke with the Trump administration after the Iran war. Her and Tucker Carlson, a few other sort of aligned on the fringe.

[Podcast Advertiser 4]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

They all were very opposed to the Iran war, broke with Trump over it, and he issued a number of tweets condemning them as traitors, saying, who cares what they think? He singled out Owens and Carlson. I've seen no evidence that they're less relevant than they were after that, than they were before it. Now, partly because the war has gone very badly. In objective terms, it was maybe smart positioning on their part to get out front of this in the same way that it was smart positioning to criticize the Iraq war if you were a Democrat in 2002 and 2003. Uh, and yet it also illustrates, I think, that while Trump has tremendous power, he can't control every facet of it. He can't control what's going on on the wings of it. When people are capable of building an independent audience through essentially monetizing online platforms, e commerce, podcasts, direct audience payments, that kind of thing is very difficult to control. If you can build up an audience that'll stick through you no matter what, that is primarily loyal to you and your worldview. And Owens and Carlson appear to have done this. They found that there's a segment of the right that wants what they have, and that has made it very difficult for even Trump to significantly damage their standing. So to think that Ben Shapiro couldn't do it. Well, yeah, clearly people like him just don't have the standing that Trump does. I think none of them do. Nobody does. And what we're learning, what we're seeing from this hot dog phenomenon, is that the people who style themselves, the rights gatekeepers of, of order and good tastes, which still exists on the right, there's still that self conception. Even though if you're a liberal listening to this, you're like, how could you possibly think that after you made Donald Trump president? Right. No, that's. That's not the way that people on the right think about it. They think there are certain principles that are worth upholding. One of them is preventing anti Semitism and explicit racial talk. They draw a line between what liberals would call or leftists would call racist and what they think is being racist or racialist. They want to try to gatekeep that stuff, and they can't. None of them can. They're just failing.

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[Zach Beecham]

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[Brian Walsh]

So let's talk about Trump because, I mean, he is a hot dog man in your story and this is particularly around the Epstein conspiracy. So he, he stokes the Epstein conspiracy for years. And now this movement he trained to see elite cover ups everywhere has decided at least some of them, that the COVID up is him in this case. And at the same time, you know, we told me this early, but like, that hasn't cost him. That's kind of remarkable, really. So much energy was put into the Epstein conspiracy, so much into the talk about it, and yet nothing seems to have stuck to Trump. No mass defections, his approval of Republicans mostly holding. So what do you learn from a scandal like that where he seems both unkillable and at the same time, that can't do any harm to him? Where does he fit into that?

[Zach Beecham]

Yeah, I mean, this is what I was hinting at a second ago, right? Like, one of the most fundamental drivers of Republican politics right now is Trump's ability to control the majority of the base. Right. The large majority of it. And he does this through this very personal, charismatic connection. You know, it has to do with his magnetism as a public speaker, his ability to mix humor with, you know, the kind of red meat that the Republican base really wants, his previous celebrity. There are all sorts of different ways in which one might understand the nature of this connection. But the important facet for now is that the connection exists and it's significant. And Trump is an outsized figure. What he says goes. And so what people take to be unshakable principles of the MAGA movement on Policy terms are very often abandoned. You know, people claim that Trump was a non interventionist. This was never true to begin with if you paid attention, attention to what he said. But even if you were only, you know, taking that, that, that sort of selective reading of Trump at face value, as maybe some of his supporters did, the vast majority of Republicans were on board with the Iran war the second it happened because Trump did it. You know, he has ballooned the deficit. Republicans said they cared about the deficit and that is just not something that's taken seriously at all. And he just doesn't really care about it. He changes his mind on things constantly. To keep going with the Iran example, one day he says he has a great relationship with the Iranians. The other day he says he hates them. They're terrible people, he can't talk to them. And it doesn't. Everyone just goes along with it, like, oh yeah, this is what Trump is saying right now. And it has to do in Republican politics with that charismatic hold on the way that people operate. So yes, Trump is a hot dog man. He's upset with the proliferation of Epstein conspiracy theories. Right. He does, he thinks something has gone wrong and certainly he has no capacity for self reflection. But he's different from the other examples in the piece, from someone like Shapiro in particular, because he has a unique ability to not suffer the consequences of his actions because he can control so many people, or at least has the loyalty of so many people as maybe a less conspiratorial puppet master way of putting it, which I think is also more accurate.

[Brian Walsh]

Yeah, I mean, you know, this is something that convinces me that the engine here really matters more than the ideas. Right. Like as you noted, the content keeps changing. Before Trump, the big sort of transgressive thing, I suppose, big part about Republicanism was libertarianism, it was Paul Ryan, it was entitlement reform. And then of course, Trump comes around and as much as the policies work, you're going in the opposite direction. So what happens? Is it just as to go back to what Massie said, you know, just. It is transgression. It is. Who can push that line further? That is where the audience on the right and with the political sport that comes along with it wants to go. Is that really what it comes down to?

[Zach Beecham]

Yeah, look, I think this is the second major driver alongside Trump of sort of the ideological, logical direction or evolution of conservative politics in the United States. Like what? What Trump identified is that much of conservative politics in the United States is animated by a kind of resentment at the liberal settlement that we arrived at after the civil rights movement, which really did reshape the contours of American public life. You know, it stigmatized insults that were once commonplace. It upended hierarchy, hierarchies in status and in wealth and in sort of social standing that were taken as given for a long period of time. And I say post civil rights because the feminist revolution, women coming into, entering the workforce in large numbers, entering higher levels of professions, becoming, by some metrics, more dominant in schools. The end of Jim Crow, mass migration, the end of a sort of racial immigration policy that we had up until the 1960s. The LGBT rights movement and all of those movements didn't just reshape policy and the social landscape. They reshaped what is sort of sayable in public and what the tenor and norms and content of public conversation are. And so much of conservative politics is a resentment at that order right now. If you're negatively inclined towards that view, you can call it racism or bigotry. If you're positively inclined towards that view, you could say, you know, it's merely a reaction to liberal overreach during that period.

[Podcast Advertiser 5]

And.

[Podcast Advertiser 2]

And.

[Zach Beecham]

And the result of that, you know, backlash against political correctness. Whatever frame you are inclined towards, it's not really relevant for the diagnosis here, because the point is, the audience, the Republican base, wants to see elements of that order smashed, elements of those norms destroyed and torn down, renovated. And they hate the way in which liberal cultural concepts really shape public life. And so the institutional GOP tried different ways of getting into this at different times, and each one seemed maybe more radical than the last. But Trump blew everything open. He showed that you could win not just by trying to push at these norms at the edges or yell at them from the cheap seats, but by frontally attacking them, by blowing them up, by saying, I can go and call Mexicans rapists publicly. I can talk about, you know, how black people live in squalor and horror and such. And what he inaugurated is an era of more and more open pushing against them from different elements of the conservative movement and those each finding more and more appeal in the conservative base. So Trump, he pushes. He. He breaks down one norm, he starts pushing against another one.

[Brian Walsh]

There's a line from your piece with Charlie Sykes, who gave you a great sort of, I think, way of characterizing it. You know, pot used to be enough, but now I need the purest meth, I find. And you're talking about that ladder, walking up that ladder. But where does the ladder end? I mean, once you've Gotten to the, I don't know, pure meth of Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens. Where is there to go and where is that leading us?

[Zach Beecham]

I suppose as well, first, a factual disclaimer. That theory does not actually work when it comes to drugs. Right. It is not the case. The most pot users end up going to meth. Right.

[Brian Walsh]

I'm going to hope that's not from

[Zach Beecham]

personal experience, but yeah, yeah, I don't, I can't, I can't speak to what Charlie was thinking about when doing that. But as to your actual question about the non metaphor, the sort of substance underlying it, it's not clear where this process ends. Right. What we can say is how it operates right now or how it's operated in the past, which is that one person pushes a boundary that they think needs to be broken down. Right. They say things that, you know, would, would be deemed impol or unacceptable or offensive by, you know, sort of mainstream audience and that wins them people on the right. It's actually part of how you build up your audience in the first place on the right. And that's true for all of these people, right? All of them. Everyone that we've, we've looked at or that I looked at in that, in this piece had pushed boundaries at one time. I mean, there are a number of different examples, but they, they then find there being a point where they think things are going too far into a direction that they really don't like. So let me give you another concrete example. Chris Rufo, who's maybe the like right's leading cultural activist, he recently had a post about Joe Kent, who is a Trump counterterrorism official who resigned in protest over the Iran war. Now, Kent is aligned with the sort of Carlson Owens wing of the party and he basically issued a resignation letter that was full of conspiratorial and I think sort of bordering on and entering into anti Semitic conspiracy theories about Israel's role in determining U.S. foreign policy. And Rufo has this whole piece criticizing that, but he notes in what almost is like a throwaway line, that he not only had liked Kent previously, but actively campaigned for the guy when he was running for Congress. Now, Kent ran for Congress twice in 2022 and 2024 and lost twice in large part because of his ties to extremists. Right. During the 2022 campaign, he literally called Nick Fuentes to get advice on, I believe it was his social media strategy. He did an interview with a neo Nazi. He made a proud boy. Paid him as a campaign consultant. Right. And these were enough, even in a. A pretty conservative part of Washington state, for him to lose to a moderate Democrat in two successive races. And Rufo knew all that at the time. Right. And yet he backed Joe Kent. He chose to do that. Why did he do that? How does that maybe suggest that he should be approaching these things differently? That trying to push on the right's escalation ladder, its tolerance of what's acceptable and what's normatively okay, is dangerous? No, not a single ounce of reflection on that point. And now he's trying in piece after piece and podcast after podcast to try to draw the line at people like Nick Fuentes, and it's just not working.

[Brian Walsh]

Is he going to succeed, do you think? I mean, can he? Because he's made the argument elsewhere that, well, actually right wing institutions are stronger than you think. They're going to be able to hold the line, I think, against his view of what's too far. Do you think agree with that? Do you think that actually can happen?

[Zach Beecham]

He said that on an episode of the Ezra Klein podcast. It's worth listening to in whole because the case is preposterous. Right. I don't understand.

[Brian Walsh]

Tell me how you actually feel.

[Zach Beecham]

Yeah, look, I've interviewed Rufo before, right? And he's very slippery. He doesn't often doesn't give you the answer that you want. He can play a little fast and loose with the facts, but in this case, what's notable in the pattern is that he doesn't really ever address how these institutions are supposed to be doing it or how they can do it in a world where they're manifestly failing right now. Right. These people are rising at this moment. What are institutions supposed to do to be policing them? And moreover, they're often falling in line with these people. One of the most important moments in conservative politics in the last year is when the Heritage Foundation's presidents issued a defense of Tucker Carlson talking to Nick Fuentes. This was last fall and winter. And basically this is the culmination of Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage foundation, which has created Project 2025, really is one of the right's most influential think tanks, had been moving in this pro Trump, isolationists, neolindburgian direction over the course of time. And he didn't lose his job over this. A number of Heritage foundation scholars quit and ended up joining a sort of Mike Pence outfit that's seen as like old Heritage in exile. And yet Roberts remains in place.

[Christy from Lululemon]

He.

[Zach Beecham]

He executed on this pivot. He apologized to a degree for the specific whitewashing of Fuentes, but again, limited consequences for him personally. In fact, people on the board who tried to get rid of him were, are now gone. Right? They're off the board. And so when there was a moment in which a leader of a right wing institution stepped into this territory, defended it, tried to bring it, if you listen to his comments, explicitly usher it into a part of the rights overall dialogue, saying it's something that has to be engaged with the sort of Tucker Fuentes worldview and people tried to police him and they lost. And that's been the story this whole time, right? It's always, always like this. There is just no evidence that the rights institutions are resilient. And for that matter, the even more obvious counter example is Trump himself, right? Nobody on the institutional right liked Donald Trump in 2016. Every single one of them has bent the knee to him since every right wing institution is to a degree made itself over into being at least if a, if they want any influence at all, being Trump friendly or aligned to a degree with his worldview, that there, there was no antibodies there, no way of stopping that particular transgressive force. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone is as potent as Trump, but it certainly means you should be a bit skeptical when people are confident that, oh, the right can beat back a challenge of extremism. Because there's no doubt, listen to what literally Marco Rubio, his Secretary of state was saying about Donald Trump in 2016 when he worried about him having a nuclear weapon. Listen to what his Vice President, J.D. vance said when he called him an American Hitler in 2016. Right? And all these people are, you know, they're now in the Trump administration. And you think the right has antibodies. Are you joking?

[Brian Walsh]

You know, you before told me something kind of, I found pretty bleak. Which is the single most anti Semitic demographic in American politics right now is young conservatives. So it keep seems like when that ratchet needs, like the next taboo it keeps finding Jewish peoples, is that incidental to what's happening? Is it structural? Why, why is that the subject that this comes back to again and again? It seems like.

[Zach Beecham]

Well, because if you pay attention to the internal discourse of the right, it's done. And people like Rufo, by the way, have played an instrumental role in this. They have dismantled the guardrails against criticizing bigotry in part because they say that allegations of bigotry are a tool that the left uses not only to control speech, but to literally destroy your life. Cancellation. You remember that whole conversation from the 2000s, right. And this became basically the uniting cause of the American right was beating back, cancel culture, destroying left wing cultural hegemony. It was very explicitly the purpose of a lot of right wing politics running up to the Trump administration. And so it became dogma on the right that you shouldn't cancel people, you can't quiet them down, you can't stop them for perceived sins of bigotry.

[Podcast Advertiser 4]

Right?

[Zach Beecham]

And specifically allegations of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, things that are sort of common lines on the left that can be used to sort of stigmatize somebody if you think they're crossing certain boundaries of taste and decency, the right side, that those were tools of thought policing, we shouldn't take those allegations very seriously. They're weaponized in bad faith and they're basically used to, to tear down conservative worldviews. The end result of that was to create a world in which those allegations have no force at all, even when it's very obvious that somebody is running afoul of said allegations. You know, talking about the genetic inferiority of a particular race in online conservative circles, that kind of thing is now shockingly common. And so there, there were few transgressions left to make on the race, gender, sex front. Now, maybe a mainstream politician could do it if they start being explicit about some of the subtext and the ways that Trump talk about these things. But that stuff, those boundaries had been broken. So if you're somebody on the right and you're looking for this thrill of transgression, the sense and that the speech police, that the old norms are being defeated, you had to look to a new area. And that new area was anti Semitism because for its own political reasons, the right carved out a very specific Israel shaped exception to its anti bigotry rule. Their pro is, pro Israel forces have been very, very powerful on the right. And I don't just mean Jews here.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

I want to be very clear about that. I am not just talking about Jews like Ben Shapiro. I'm talking about the much larger numerically and much more influential group of Christian Zionists on the right. You know, groups like Christians United for Israel are extraordinary power, extraordinarily powerful in internal right wing politics. They are, and they play a major institutional role in the Republican Party and conservative organizing. And those groups really cared about policing anti Israel discourse. They really cared also about being able to claim that people on the left were anti Semitic bigots. So the charge of anti Semitism in right wing discourse still had some validity, some potency.

[Podcast Advertiser 1]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

You Call someone an anti Semite on the right and you are using a label that actually hurts in a way that calling them a racist doesn't. And that is what the sort of Carlson Owens people figured out could power. Another kind of countercultural revolt is if you go after the anti Semitism taboo, you're giving your audience the thrill that they got the first time Trump started talking about Mexicans being rapists, or when people on the right start talking about Somalis as like some kind of cancer on the American body politic, which is, is pretty much the language they use to describe that entire ethnic group now. And that thrill, that joy, really helped cement a massive audience for them. And really here, Nick Fuentes was proof of concept. I mean, Fuentes is as radical and explicitly anti Semitic as anyone could possibly be. The man said I love Hitler in a broadcast right? And he built up a major audience despite being mass stigmatized, despite being part of the same alt right that had in many ways lost its purchase after Charlottesville, really sort of demolished the movement as an organized force. But Fuentes proved that its ideas were still extremely influential. And the idea still carried mass currency among a lot of young, really engaged Republicans. Carlson tried to dismiss Fuentes at one point. He lost their kind of online sparring match and then brought him into the coalition with a friendly interview. And here we are now that we talk about the Tuckerson, we talk about the Carlson, Fuentes Owens axis or sort of alliance or faction of the Republican Party, whereas they used to be enemies not that long ago, some subset of them. And that illustrates just how lucrative getting into that side of the right is and just how, I mean, honestly, how much anti Semitism pays.

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[Brian Walsh]

So you sketch three futures for the conservative booth, a kind of establishment restoration, factional warfare, I think, and chaos. So can you rank them and what is your actual bet off the bat for what we're going to see with the Republican Party after Trump?

[Zach Beecham]

Here's how I see the sort of overarching structure here. Right after Trump, you don't have a kingmaker in the Republican Party. You don't have any one person who can say this is the way things are going to be. No one has that standing. It's very obvious that no one is even close to having that standing. So what you get is going to be a bare knuckles brawl. Everybody knows that. So that's just sort of basic table setting of what the sort of situation is going to be. How that could work out depends on some specific factors. Of the possibilities that you listed, I think the least likely is an establishment sort of resurgence. But it's not impossible. And the reason it's not impossible is because there are lots of different sub factions of MAGA that are going to be angry at each other or MAGA aligned groups. Just imagine the slugfest between the Ben Shapiro types and the Tucker Carlson types when there's no longer Trump to mediate them at that point. And so that creates an opening for a lot of these elected officials who there's a lot of them in Congress who are not MAGA types, but realize they have to pretend to be one publicly and would like things to go back to the way they were in 2015 to try to figure out who they can nominate that would be in 2028 that would be a sort of plausible enough candidate to the MAGA factions while also capture the support of the voters who remain in the Republican Party who would like things to sort of go back to what they were before in the past. I think there aren't that many of those voters left. It would be very hard. It's not impossible to imagine it happening, but it would be hard now. Next thing is second, most likely is continued radicalization, which is basically, you know, I've described a ratchet over the course of time, the right moving in more and more extreme directions and that proceeds. I think that looks a lot like basically, J.D. vance winning in 2028. Vance is. There's. There's no secret that Vance is aligned with the Carlson wing of the party. He's had publicly to engage in defense of Trump on the Iran stuff just because by virtue of being vice president. But he's also made it very clear that through leaks that probably only could have come from him or his camp, that he was opposed to the Iran war inside, that he's been trying to take credit for the ceasefire, which may or may not be falling apart as we record. Like he really wants to be seen as the peace guy on Iran, which is not. That part of. It's not bad, but it's illustrating that he's setting up for a run for that camp. And it's also because, I mean, we know from reporting on 2024 that Carlson was instrumental in Vance's selection as vice president. We know from the kinds of people that Vance associated with during his run and beforehand. We know from the things that he said. Right. The way he's described himself as an opponent of the regime. That was his term for the current ruling order in the United States. Right. That he's a real radical in these areas. And he's certainly somebody who's very comfortable with this conspiracist verging on anti Semitic worldview. Even though I can't find an example of Vance himself explicitly engaging in anti Semitism specifically. Right. But the blood and stone, he certainly

[Brian Walsh]

delivered a very strong message to the Israeli government, the Israeli people, around the time the Iran survivors, I recall.

[Zach Beecham]

Yeah, I think that's. That's defensible in policy terms, I would say. And so I don't want to treat that as an example of anti Semitism. But. But his blood and soil worldview. Right. Which he's laid out pretty. Almost like he might say that's a slur, but that's almost verbatim what he said in his 2024 RNC speech when he talked about how he was linked to a plot of land in Kentucky. Right. It's like he believes that there are certain Americans who are more Americans than Others. And those are the ones who, you know, it's unclear exactly what the fighting line is. Yeah. Like heritage Americans.

[Podcast Advertiser 4]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

It's a people. It's white Anglo Saxons of some form. Maybe. I don't know if descendants of German immigrants start to count. When you start to think about these things more specifically, they don't make any sense.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Sense.

[Podcast Advertiser 3]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

The categories break down.

[Podcast Advertiser 1]

Yeah.

[Brian Walsh]

We could get really in a hole if we were that way.

[Zach Beecham]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there, look, that's. We could. It's like you start rerunning 19th century intra white racism, which was a very big thing back then, but that's what that worldview logically leads to. But that is one that is not friendly to Jews is the way I would put it mildly. And it shows that he's very ideologically simpatico with that world. And I think if Vance wins, you do see the ascendance of. Of that wing of the Republican Party. I don't know if you see a permanent victory of that side. I don't know if that's where Republican politics is heading. And which is why I think the most likely scenario is the last one that you suggested, which is continued chaos. I think that Trump is. I've said this many times over the course of this episode, but it's really. Can't. The. The importance of it can't be overstated. He is a unique figure in his ability to control the passions of the movement that he has created. And without him, I don't see how the Republican Party can tame the competing factions inside of it.

[Brian Walsh]

Last question just before we go. You know, all this is happening, this transgression pushing, while the Republican Party controls the White House, Supreme Court, both houses of Congress. Right?

[Zach Beecham]

Yeah.

[Brian Walsh]

You know, assuming that change, if this is what it's like with power, this sort of conspiratorial mindset, what is it gonna look like when they're not in power? If they're not in power, as you think is likely in 2028, just how far could that go?

[Zach Beecham]

Well, I mean, think about what happened the last two times.

[Podcast Advertiser 1]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

So go back to the Obama presidency. What happened then? The Tea Party. Right. Which.

[Brian Walsh]

But now with like a completely different media environment and one where you can actually, I think, capitalize on that in a way that even you weren't really able to do to the same degree as then.

[Zach Beecham]

That's what I was saying. Look at the Biden presidency.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

What happened during then. Much of what I'm talking about emerged while Joe Biden was president.

[Podcast Advertiser 3]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

It emerged because There was a, a sense that liberal control over society had become suffocating, had become too dangerous. And in part, this is a backlash to the specifics of one, what. One, what one might call woke during that period of time. But I don't think that's really it. Right. It's, that's, that's part of it. That was a symptom that was blamed. But this is too consistent a strain in conservative politics to be attributable to one particular shift in the way that left wing politics operated. No, it's that when out of power, they feel existentially threatened. They feel that the country is being destroyed. Right. By the, or at least the country that they want the United States to be is being destroyed. Almost literally. Right. Like, listen to the way even in power, someone like Stephen Miller talks, right. He talks about if you don't have a border, you don't have a country. Right. And he said that there was an open border during the, the Biden administration. So pretty much the logical inference from that is America was dead during Joe Biden. Obviously, that's, that's hyperbolic and weird, but it's, it's the kind of language that resonates with conservative audiences during periods out of power. Not just, you know, we are losing or we've lost, but, but the country will be permanently altered if we do not win. And so I think if Republicans lose in 2028, that will be the tenor. I don't know the specific way in which it will manifest.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

It was different 2020 than it was in 2009.

[Podcast Advertiser 3]

Right.

[Zach Beecham]

And that's partly in large part because of Trump's influence. And when Trump's gone, maybe it will look different in a different way. I don't know. But I think the one thing that's consistent, the thing that hasn't changed is politics will be perceived as a zero sum game of dominance, where if we lose, we're dead, the country is dead. The America that you love is dead, your children's future is dead. I don't know who the culprit will be, and I don't know who will benefit from this politically, but I do know that that will be a major register of right wing discourse during that time, and it will give rise to some new permutation of this sort of extremism that's been very common on the right.

[Brian Walsh]

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know I did. But as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line@the grayareaox.com or leave us a message on our voicemail line 1-800-214-5749. And once you're finished with that, go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. This episode was produced by Thor New Rider and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Kristen Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of the Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up, and if you decide to sign up because of the show, let us know.

[Podcast Advertiser 5]

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